Exciting Novel
Mathes, William
Exciting Novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen. Random House. 373 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by William Mathes Just about everything one can say about this book points to its...
...Laid naked to the sun and sky, he felt himself open like a flower...
...his philosophical stance is as old as inquiry itself and as contemporary as existentialism...
...The only man" because he has attained the substantial base of all true wisdom, that there is no security except insecurity, that it is uniquely human and intensely real to tremble one minute and celebrate the next, that (and this quotation from Hermann Hesse is the book's frontispiece) "The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf and to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life...
...they live because Matthiessen's search for life and meaning is active, intelligent, and imaginative...
...The difference is Matthiessen...
...If you have a more explicit turn of mind, you will enjoy the book's layers of themes, its many and significant interrelationships: the noble savage and existential-man combined (not comfortably) in the person of Moon, an Ivy League American Indian...
...Here the sums of conventionality add up to an unconventional experience...
...this is the use of the novel as a search for truth...
...But for this reviewer the excitement of the book is found in its philosophical base...
...Apparently thinking to write an adventure story, Peter Matthiessen has written a popular novel that transcends its genre...
...for example, all the redeeming people, even the potentially redeeming, in the book die or are killed...
...everything except the undeniable impact of the whole...
...the questionable virtues of modern civilization confronting the equally, if different, questionable virtues of primi-tivism...
...He responds to them, certainly, but he has created them as a philosopher creates a system or a hypothesis—to see what might happen if...
...Reviewed by William Mathes Just about everything one can say about this book points to its disarming conventionality: style, conception, characterizations, and imagery...
...They are part of personal explorations...
...Their jump-off place is a village on the edge of the Amazonian jungle—a sweaty, foul place run by a tyrannical policeman and inhabited by assorted natives, prostitutes, a cynical and aging Catholic priest, and two American flying-bums: Moon, an American Indian, and Wolfie, a beatlike San Franciscan...
...Mix well, add a bit of sexual cross-fertilization between Moon and one of the missionary women and between the same woman and her husband's colleague, put the American Indian (who harbors a fantasy of primitive freedom and purity) in the midst of the savage tribe, and keep the pace fast and tense with violence —and Matthiessen has all the ingredients of a typical popular novel...
...Sometimes Matthiessen frankly despairs of the human condition...
...And only a few paragraphs later: "The wind was bright...
...The jungle is all life, almost too improbable and chaotic to know...
...Here one of the world's eminent naturalists and explorers (inevitably a philosopher) seeks a popular audience and uses the novel as a platform for esoteric and vital contemporary explorations...
...At dark he built an enormous fire, in celebration of the only man beneath the eye of Heaven...
...He was neither white nor Indian, man nor animal, but some mute, naked strand of protoplasm...
...At Play in the Fields of the Lord is about getting deeper and deeper into the vagaries and varieties of human existence, about exploring the inconsistencies, the ambivalence, of the human condition, about the human-defining search for meaning we all undertake, in trepidation and celebration...
...He groaned with the ache of his own transience...
...At the end, Moon (the character with whom Matthiessen seems to identify) is lost on a jungle river, feeling the complexity and ambivalence so characteristic of this story: "He felt bereft, though of what he did not know...
...The key to what makes this book so fine is the fact that its author never makes up his mind about the people and events he has created...
...Two missionary families attempt to bring their message and their meager lives to a primitive South American tribe that has an unbroken history of murder and cruelty and an unrelenting hate for modern civilization in any form...
...Like a conversation with an inspired philosopher, this novel is a journey of questioning that ends with more questions...
...Soon he slept...
...No person comes off as well as does the jungle—its thrust, mystery, and blind immortality...
...These same ingredients mixed by a less skillful—and less philosophically aware—writer would result in just another pothoiler pointing for condensation in Reader's Digest...
Vol. 30 • February 1966 • No. 2
